1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data processing systems and, in particular, to providing applications on servers in a network. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and program for chaining server applications.
2. Background of the Invention
Machine translation (MT) is a computer technology wherein a computer software program or computer hardware translates a textual source human language into some textual target human language. An example is translation from English to German. Machine translation services are provided for many pairs of languages. Typically, a language pair supplier may develop language pair engines that can provide translation for common language pairs. However, to provide a machine translation for every possible combination of source language and target language would require an extremely large amount of time and code. Thus, it is unrealistic to provide a language pair for every possible combination, especially considering that demand for most pairs may be very low or nonexistent.
Machine translation may be provided for some pairs by chaining pairs together. For example, translation from German to French may be provided by chaining a German-to-English translation with an English-to-French translation. Providers may also wish to add other applications, such as verification or statistics services, in a chain. For example, a provider may develop a new application for counting the number of words to be translated. This application may be added to the beginning of the chain. However, to do so may require specific modifications to the server software.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an improved mechanism for chaining server applications.